Shaping What Comes Next
As Product Manager at Windward Software, Ashley Debenham helps decide where System Five goes next. Her work sits between what customers need, what the business is aiming for and what engineering can deliver. She turns retailers’ feedback into clear requirements, so each release solves a real problem for the people using it at the counter, in the warehouse and in the back office.
A Developer’s Perspective Ashley
joined Windward in 2018 as a Junior Software Developer, writing code for the platform she now helps steer. That start gives her an advantage in product work: she knows what a feature should do, and also how it gets built and what it takes to get it right. Before Windward she worked as a game developer, where she learned to pay close attention to how people actually use software.
From Requirements to Release
Since moving into product management in 2020, Ashley has worked as Associate Product Manager, Business Analyst and Temporary QA Lead. Those roles have taken her through every stage of a release, from discovery and specification to testing and delivery. Leading QA convinced her that quality isn’t a final checkpoint. It has to be built in from the first requirement.
Grounded in Retail
Before her career in software, Ashley spent five years as a sales associate at Winners, Marshalls and HomeSense, and did seasonal work in horticulture. That time serving customers, handling stock and working through busy seasons shapes how she thinks about the independent retailers who run their businesses on System Five every day. Ashley studied at the University of British Columbia and works remotely from Clearwater, British Columbia.
